A CRediT author statement is a structured list, attached to a published paper, that records which of the 14 standardised Contributor Roles Taxonomy roles each author performed. This page gives four ready-to-adapt sample statements — standard, lead/equal/supporting qualifiers, equal/co-first-author, and non-author acknowledgment — plus how Elsevier and other publishers actually collect them.
The illustrative author names below (Zhang San, Priya Patel, Erin Wright, Adam Lloyd, Maria García-López) are the same placeholder roster used elsewhere on this site — not a real publication. “Zhang San” is also the placeholder name used in Elsevier’s own published CRediT documentation, so it doubles as a realistic stand-in for the kind of name you’ll see in publisher-provided examples.
Four sample statements you can adapt
1. Standard statement, no qualifiers
This is the format most journals accept by default, and the one closest to what publishers like Elsevier show in their own author guidance: authors listed in byline order, each followed by the roles they performed, no lead/equal/supporting qualifier attached.
Zhang San: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software.
Priya Patel: Data curation, Writing – original draft.
Erin Wright: Visualization, Investigation.
Adam Lloyd: Supervision, Validation.
Maria García-López: Writing – review & editing, Funding acquisition.A published statement in this style doesn’t need every role used, and no author needs more than one or two — assign only what actually happened. Full definitions for each role are on the roles index.
2. Statement with lead / equal / supporting qualifiers
The optional degree-of-contribution qualifier is part of the ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 standard itself, not a publisher add-on. Use it when it is genuinely informative — for example, when two people worked on the same role but at different levels of responsibility:
Zhang San: Conceptualization (lead), Software, Formal analysis (supporting).
Priya Patel: Data curation (lead), Writing – original draft (equal).
Erin Wright: Writing – original draft (equal), Investigation.
Adam Lloyd: Supervision (lead), Project administration.In JATS XML this is encoded as a specific-use attribute on the <role> element (specific-use="lead", "equal", or "supporting") — see the JATS XML encoding guide for the full markup.
3. Equal contribution / co-first-author statement
“Equal” in a CRediT statement means two or more people performed the same role at the same level — it is not the same mechanism as a typographic co-first-author marker (a symbol and footnote reading something like “these authors contributed equally,” common in biomedical journals). A paper can need both, and they are not interchangeable:
Zhang San†: Conceptualization (equal), Investigation, Writing – original draft (equal).
Priya Patel†: Conceptualization (equal), Investigation, Writing – original draft (equal).
†These authors contributed equally to this work.The CRediT “(equal)” qualifier tells a reader which roles were shared equally. The footnote is a separate, journal-specific convention about byline order and citation credit. Don’t assume one implies the other; state both if both are true.
4. Statement that also credits a non-author contributor
People who contributed but don’t meet a journal’s authorship criteria (medical writers, research assistants, core-facility staff) are not CRediT authors, but many journals still want their contribution described using the same 14 roles, placed in the acknowledgments rather than the byline. The ICMJE Recommendations require the corresponding author to get written permission before naming anyone in an acknowledgment, since acknowledgment can imply the person endorses the paper’s conclusions. The Good Publication Practice (GPP 2022) guidelines apply this specifically to professional medical writers:
Author Contributions
Zhang San: Conceptualization, Methodology.
Priya Patel: Data curation, Writing – original draft.
Acknowledgments
We thank [medical writer name], who provided writing – review & editing support funded by [sponsor], in accordance with GPP 2022 guidelines. Included with permission.Author order is not the same thing as a CRediT statement
This is the most common mix-up in practice, and it’s worth stating plainly: a CRediT statement describes what each person did. It does not determine, and is not determined by, byline order (first author, middle authors, senior or last author) or by who qualifies as an author at all. Byline order and authorship qualification are governed separately — typically by the ICMJE authorship criteria (substantial contribution, drafting or revising, final approval, and accountability) or a journal’s own policy; see CRediT for authors for how the two relate. In practice this means reordering a CRediT statement doesn’t change the byline, and listing someone’s CRediT roles doesn’t by itself make them an author if they haven’t met the journal’s authorship bar.
How Elsevier, and most major publishers, actually collect this
Per Elsevier’s own CRediT author statement guidance, the corresponding author selects one or more of the 14 roles for each co-author directly in the submission system (Editorial Manager), rather than typing free text. The resulting statement is typeset above the acknowledgments section of the published article. Elsevier states plainly that CRediT “in no way changes the journal’s criteria to qualify for authorship” — it’s metadata about contribution type, not a new authorship gate. Most other major publishers that collect CRediT (PLOS, Wiley, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, SAGE, Cambridge University Press, MDPI, Frontiers) follow the same shape: structured role selection at submission, rendered as a standard paragraph in the published version, though the exact submission-system field names and workflow step vary by publisher. Check your target journal’s current author guidelines for the specific mechanism.
Machine-readable versions, for people building the submission form
If you’re implementing CRediT capture in a submission system, repository, or CRIS rather than writing a statement by hand, don’t hand-roll the encoding. CASRAI documents two reference encodings, both aligned to the same canonical role identifiers used throughout this page:
- CRediT in JATS XML — the
<role>element with avocab-term-identifierpointing at the canonical role URI, plus thespecific-useattribute for lead, equal, or supporting. - CRediT in JSON-LD — Schema.org’s
Rolewrapper, for non-XML pipelines such as headless publishing systems, repositories, and discovery platforms.
Both trace back to the same authority: ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, approved by ANSI on 14 January 2022 and published by NISO on 8 February 2022, which formalized the 14 roles CASRAI had stewarded since taking over the taxonomy’s development in 2014 (CRediT originated at a 2012 Wellcome Trust and Harvard workshop). NISO’s CRediT Standing Committee, with CASRAI participating as the taxonomy’s originating steward, now maintains the standard.
Is there a CRediT author statement generator?
Not yet as a standalone CASRAI tool. Downloadable, paste-ready statement templates (Word, LaTeX, Markdown, plain text) are planned for CASRAI’s author templates page alongside the site’s v2026.2 release; until those ship, the reliable way to assemble a statement is the pattern shown above, checked against the canonical 14-role index so you’re not using a role that doesn’t exist in the standard. In practice, most authors don’t need a separate generator at all: publishers that collect CRediT as structured metadata (Elsevier’s Editorial Manager is a good example) generate the final formatted statement automatically once you’ve selected roles per author — you’re filling in a form, not writing prose.
Frequently asked
What is a CRediT author statement?
A CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) author statement is a structured list, attached to a published paper, that records which of the 14 standardised roles each author performed — separate from the narrative acknowledgments and separate from authorship qualification itself. For the full definition and step-by-step guidance on writing one, see CRediT for authors.
What does a CRediT author statement look like for an Elsevier submission?
The same 14-role structure used by any CRediT-adopting publisher (sample 1 above), entered as structured metadata in Elsevier’s Editorial Manager rather than free text, and typeset above the acknowledgments section of the published article. See Elsevier’s CRediT author statement page for their current instructions.
Is there a CRediT author statement generator?
Not as a dedicated CASRAI tool yet — see the generator section above for what’s planned and what to use in the meantime.
Related CASRAI resources
- CRediT for authors — the full step-by-step guide, including CRediT vs. ICMJE and AI-disclosure guidance
- The 14 CRediT roles — definitions and canonical identifiers
- CRediT in JATS XML
- CRediT in JSON-LD
- ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022
- Downloadable author templates
- AI-use disclosure guidance
- ICMJE Recommendations: Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors
